I won’t try to summarize Khazan’s argument here, except to say that she dismissed the value of coding for most journalists:

If you want to be a reporter, learning code will not help. It will only waste time that you should have been using to write freelance articles or do internships—the real factors that lead to these increasingly scarce positions.

She couldn’t be more wrong. And I say this as someone who knows little coding. I took a web design class in the 1990s but forgot most of it. I can cut and paste embed codes or other snippets of code and sometimes I can find or fix a problem in the HTML version of a post. But one of the most glaring holes in my skill set is my ignorance of coding. Filling that gap is on my someday list, but my somedays have been too rare and my list too long.

If you’re a journalism student, fill that gap now, even if you want to be a reporter (or whatever you want to be). If you’re on a journalism school curriculum committee, insist that your students fill that gap.

Here are six reasons why J-schools should teach students to code:

Journalism students don’t know how their careers will unfold. I took classes in photography and copy-editing when I was a student at TCU many years ago. I didn’t plan to be a photographer or a copy editor. I was wrong about being a copy editor. I spent a couple years on the copy desk of the Des Moines Register, important years that helped shape the rest of my career. And I had to carry a camera for many of my years as a reporter. Both skills were more important to me than I could have imagined as a journalism student (and remain important today).

Journalism graduates need a well-rounded education. Even if my career unfolded in different directions and I never used those photography and copy-editing skills (and others), they were things competent journalists should know. Computer coding is at least as important today as those two skills. They are part of literacy in a digital newsroom (and every newsroom is growing increasingly digital, or will).

Some journalism students don’t really know what they want to do. Part of the value of a journalism education is that it helps students see the possibilities of their careers. I don’t think many people come into J-school aspiring to be copy editors. They want to be reporters, columnists, news anchors, the most visible positions in journalism. But they fall in love with editing or design or something else (or at least learn that that’s what they are good at) as they are getting a well-rounded education and they change directions. Give students at least a taste of coding so that it’s part of that well-rounded education for everyone. And some will fall in love the first time they build something cool and become actual hacker journos.

Journalism students need to offer value to employers. If you want to be a reporter, that’s great. So did I, and I enjoyed many good years of reporting. But supply exceeds demand right now in reporting jobs. The reporter who can build something to make the fruits of her reporting interactive is more valuable to a potential employer than a reporter who’s just good with words and videos. The reporter who understands coding is going to be better at talking with the newsroom’s developers (or with IT’s developers) to execute a great digital package. Journalism schools that turn out reporters with coding skills will find more jobs for their graduates, even if they all become reporters (which is ridiculous, of course; they will pursue multiple paths and coding should be one of those available to them).

Journalism schools need to offer value to students. A j-school education is damned expensive. Cost will vary depending on your school, but we’re high in five figures or likely into six figures by the time a student graduates. As noted above, supply and demand are on the employer’s side for graduates looking for reporting jobs. But supply and demand tip a bit more toward the graduate if you have some basic coding skills. And if you have a strong combination of journalism and development skills, supply and demand become your friends. (I suspect the coding skills Khazan finds useless might have looked attractive to an employer who hired her to report.)

We should teach and plan for the future. Consider how much value coding skills have gained just in the three-plus years that today’s seniors have been in school. That growth will accelerate in the time today’s freshmen are in school. If Khazan’s arguments make a shred of sense today (they don’t), they’ll be outdated by the time those freshmen graduate. Journalism schools need to be updating curriculum constantly, and universities have slow processes for updating. Any view to the future should recognize the growing value of programming skills.

Update: I invited Khazan to comment, which she did below and in this comment by email:

Aside from the photo, which I maintain was a joke that some (for maybe good reason) didn’t get… If you accept that time is a finite resource, and you want to get a job as a reporter, I still think the best thing is to have great stories and internships. For the most part, people who are concerned about not getting to be reporters aren’t worried about how they’ll communicate with tech teams later on or expand their roles to be more digital once they’re already working somewhere. They just want to get that initial reporting job. Then, once you’re a metro reporter at some mid-size paper, sure, do all the Code Academy you want on weekends.

I appreciate the response. I disagree, but I think we’ve both made our points. Thanks!

Update: A question and answer from Twitter.

@ellenkobe Some tweeps yesterday recommended CodeAcademy. Have heard good things about that (it’s on my someday list).

Unrelated side observation

This Wikimedia Commons photo that ran with Olga Khazan’s piece on whether to teach coding has nothing to do with the topic.

The photo that accompanied Khazan’s blog post was laugh-out-loud funny. It’s like a photo I might have chosen to discredit the post. Look: There’s a person writing on a clipboard — not even a reporter’s notebook or legal pad, the reporter’s most common places for taking notes. And an old IBM Selectric from the 1970s is in front of her, with a computer terminal of the same era behind her. Really? You want to use this photo to illustrate a point about journalism education in 2013?

One of my greatest weaknesses as a blogger is that I don’t make good enough and frequent enough use of art to illustrate my posts. But this piece illustrates my point that you can’t just throw any damn picture in there to illustrate.

One of the things that resonates the most with me is that this is college. This is the time in your life for trying new things, and so many students don’t know for sure what they even want to do when they graduate. There is a reason that many universities have breadth requirements where students have to take a lot of classes outside of their major and college. Should journalism students who “just want to be reporters” also skip statistics and constitutional law?

My fear with a lot of journalism programs is that they focus so much on traditional journalism skills that students who might like programming or working with data will never find this out. I’m not advocating throwing out writing and editing, but I firmly believe that journalism students should be exposed to Web, social and programming skills.

And of course I agree with you on employability. A journalism student with more skills will be more employable than a student with less. A lot of employers also like their young journalists to be curious, and learning about more than just traditional journalism skills shows some curiosity.

I think one thing that got lost in the article is that coding isn’t a reporting skill, per se. It’s a way to render the results of reporting. If someone wants to be a better writer and reporter, given a finite number of classes, and further build a writing portfolio, then a coding course will not help.

I recently completed a multimedia-focused journalism program that started out with an HTML/CSS class. A year later, half of my cohort couldn’t remember what a tag was, holding back the rest of the class in subsequent coding-focused courses. In all likelihood these people won’t every code again, especially since they don’t need to. CMSs and tools are being created in part so people don’t need to know how to code. As Khazan said, she uses free online tools to create visuals for her work. (I feel like this point could have been better emphasized on her part, if only to fend off those who tried to paint her as a Luddite.)

I was particularly put off by some of the snide remarks that came out in response, like “I just side-eye when this conversation rolls around now.” (from an ONA Board nominee). It feels like a case of people standing so close to an issue and can’t see it clearly. When people live in a circle with others who share the same attitudes, it’s easy to forget there are a lot people who live and think outside of the journo-coding bubble. Those people may of course, be guilty of the same thing, but that just makes both parties two sides of the same coin.

What’s wrong with wanting to specialize, and use j-school to improve writing and reporting? If not learning code hurts someone’s job chances, that should be their prerogative.

That all said, the six points you outline strengthen the argument for requiring code. Perhaps it’s like broccoli – doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it’s good for you. After all, Khazan wouldn’t know that she doesn’t like coding had she not taken the course(s).

I do think, however, there should be some serious retooling of how it is taught. I sat in a great session at ONA13 on Tabletop.js/Handlebar. As one instructor explained, learning to use tools such as these is also a great way to learn basic coding at the same time. I’m not sure CodeAcademy – as Khazan suggests – is a good solution. As one of the instructors said, it’s like learning code in a bubble – it taught him to build a useless financial calculator.

Still, there are many opportunities to harness coding for the reporting process. Take, for example, the Guardian’s effort to crowdsource more than 700,000 receipts from the UK’s Members of Parliament [http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/jun/18/mps-expenses-houseofcommons]. They wrote code to create a framework that allowed their audience to dig through all those receipts and to flag frivolous or terribly expensive personal expenditures using tax monies. Their reporters then followed up with that info to do more reporting. Now that’s not what we think of as traditional reporting, but coding opened up a way to go through a gigantic stack of receipts in a far more efficient manner than a couple of reporters could have done.

That’s an excellent point. We (or at least I) don’t often think of developers as reporters, per se. This serves as a reminder that the roles are complementary, and not entirely fixed.

At the same time, this illustrates how these roles are complementary in part because the respective parties are specialized. By saying that I don’t mean to support or contradict Khazan’s point, but it shows how the best journalistic ventures often require multiple people doing what they do best, which unfortunately takes more resources than most organizations seem to have these days (unlike the Guardian, NY Times, etc.).

As an aside, have you ever heard of a computer science program that offers a reporting track? That could be interesting…

I know of some j-schools that offer programming/data courses, and I co-taught a collaborative class for computer science and journalism majors on developing iPhone apps (I taught the product-development and content-gathering aspects and a computer science prof taught the development). Closest I know to what you described is Columbia’s dual master’s program: http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/page/276-dualdegree-journalism-computer-science/279

Good post. As someone who frequently works with new hires and interns, I appreciate when someone comes along who knows even a modicum of coding — enough to make small tweaks inside a story we’re posting in a corporate-built CMS.

[…] Olga Khazan had a bad experience with learning how to code (more on that later) and Steve Buttry can think of 6 reasons why journalists should learn how to do just that. The zombie debate ‘Should journalists learn to code?’ stiffens and groans once more, […]

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An appreciation class should be enough. You want to know what is involved, but you don’t want to do it yourself. Find coders with whom you can partner. They need you and you need them. Remember your economics of the division of labor. If you don’t know, ask an economics student. I’m a professional as high above the throng as a pro golfer above the common golfer. You’ll never be able to do what I do as fast and as well as I do it. Why waste the time when you can offer me a swap of your journalism abilities for my computer abilities?

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